First of all, I'm sorry if this is a duplicated topic. The search didn't find any relevant similar post.

I have a bit of a problem with my materials. If I use normal mapping, even if just very little, I get a lot of black (unlit?) pixels on the shadow side of the mesh. I already tried using 512 samples in my lamp, and increasing the AA samples, but the difference is almost unnoticeable.

Here is the Yafaray rendered image:

If you look at it you can see it looks grainy and just not right (although on the faces where the light hits it looks very good) and if you inspect closely you will notice that those are pure black pixels.

Here's a BI render to compare (Yafaray render is also rendered with direct lighting integrator):

Comparing side by side, Blender's render seem to have some sort of blur applied on it, but I can't find a way to get smooth results like that with Yafaray. Antialias passes won't fix it.

Here you can see YR rendered preview and how it looks. Also, I don't see EWA interpolation option. Images are .png files if that matters.

I could provide a blend file, but this is just the default material (Shiny Diffuse, if I'm not wrong), with no tweaks, just color and normal textures (for normal the "use as normal map" option is checked).

I could also provide the textures if you want to try, just let me know. Although it's not the first time I see this issue, so I guess textures are clean.